"This is a large and confusing game..."

One of the innovations of Space Quest was the use of a 30-sided die. You should understand, there was no 30-sided die available when this game was published (nor was there a 10-sided die), so the idea of using a 30-sided die was very unusual. —A Paladin in Citadel

Blake effect

My cousin—Louis Auchincloss?

After the invasion he was sent to the Pacific and while onboard a ship to Japan wrote another novel, only to throw it in the trash. He finally began his writing career with “The Indifferent Children,” a novel published by Prentice-Hall in 1947 after he had returned to Sullivan & Cromwell. It appeared under the pseudonym Andrew Lee, in deference to his mother, who thought the book “trivial and vulgar” and feared it would damage his career. —NYT

Ulm, Wyoming

Thursday, January 28, 2010

What about Archie Bell?

For several years, I was under the impression that Chris Bell, of Big Star and "I Am The Cosmos" fame, was the son of the man who created Taco Bell. I even used to enjoy sharing this bit of false trivia with people, helping to spread my own inadvertently created rock'n'roll "urban legend".

I only recently learned the truth and realized the cause of my confusion. Somewhere along the line, I had taken two pieces of accurate but incomplete information - Bell's father owned a restaurant and Taco Bell was founded by a Mr. Bell - and put them together. In fact, Chris Bell's father was a restaurateur, but his place was called the Knickerbocker. And the founder of Taco Bell was named Bell, but he was from Southern California, not Memphis, and was apparently no relation.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Fifteen cents gets you...

Focal points

On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the museum accidentally fell into “The Actor,” causing the tear. Officials at the museum said that since the damage did not occur “in the focal point of the composition,” they expected that the repair would be “unobtrusive,” according to a statement released on Sunday.

A drawing by Lucian Freud valued at more than $100,000 was accidentally put through a shredder by Sotheby’s in London in 2000. A man tripped over his shoelace on a staircase at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and managed to shatter three Qing dynasty porcelain vases, as The Guardian reported.

Addendum to last couple of posts

It all sounds distractingly kooky, but the Believer's writing is generally sharp, funny and insightful enough to keep you hooked, even when you could have sworn you had no prior interest in Malibu-based 50s surfer gal Gidget or what happened to the guy who invented Dungeons and Dragons.

The thundering of the dice

If a rich, well-orchestrated RPG bears similarities to a work of fiction, what happens when a work of fiction is about an RPG? The answer, in the anthology "Gamer Fantastic" edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes (DAW: 310 pp., $7.99), is something akin to vertigo. Despite the goofy cover (a kid giddily wielding a Nintendo handset, planet exploding in the background), "Gamer Fantastic" is more about this blurring between RPGs and reality than remote-control video mayhem. The brisk opener, Chris Pierson's "Escapism," manages a clever twist on the character of the first-person-shooter-obsessed teen, but most of the other 12 stories here involve significantly lower technology. As with writing stories, the games in question are primarily built of words -- albeit with oddly shaped dice thundering in the background.

I also give a nod to my current home page—James Maliszewski's Grognardia.

The reviews are trickling in...

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Details, details

I.

A Manhattan criminal court case against two women charged with prostitution may be in jeopardy after defense lawyers argued on Tuesday that the prosecution erroneously used the word “and” instead of “or” in the charging document filed in court. —NYT, City Room blog

And there’s the rub. Walser Chrysler says that the price was “an administrative error,” The Star Tribune reported. The dealership contacted Ms. Townsend two weeks after the purchase to say that it wanted an additional $7,000 or she needed to return the car.—Dealer Sues Woman to Cancel "Good Deal," NYT

The worst haircut...

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Rejection

"Zappa was important to me because I realised I didn't have to make music like he did. I might have made a lot of music like he did if he had not done it first and made me realise that I did not want to go there. I did not like his music but I am grateful that he did it. Sometimes you learn as much from the things you don't like as from the things you do like. The rejection side is as important as the endorsement part. You define who you are and where you are by the things that you know you are not. Sometimes that's all the information you have to go on. I'm not that kind of person. You don't quite know where you are but you find yourself in the space left behind by the things you've rejected."

The Original of Pistachio

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The first and the last

A Lover’s Almanac is performative, dizzying, richly layered, like some fabulous brocade. By the time The Rags of Time emerges, the writing has taken a long journey, through the bittersweet and intoxicating Big As Life, through the sad rich quiet of The Silver Screen. Each volume succeeds in transforming its season into something foreign, unknown. And, like the seasons, each book expands and alters the stories that came before it. Because the seasons are cyclical instead of linear, this is, potentially, an infinite process. At the end of the forth book I wanted to begin all over again-I wanted to revise my reading with re-reading. What could the first volume say about the last? What could the early lives tell me about the later ones?

Monday, January 11, 2010

Laugh o' the Day™

Clunky lyrics are everywhere, undoing some of the progress Omarion has made. The otherwise lovely “Speedin’,” Omarion’s most convincing song here, takes its car imagery a little too seriously: “I called AAA/They said they on the way.” —Jon Caramanica, NYT

Variations on original sin

At The Unarchivable, I've put up a footnoteless version of my American Fantastic Tales cento. Sample paragraph:

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Sonic youth

And you can quote me on that

The company’s FluoroXprene offering can be formulated as either a thermoplastic vulcanizate or thermoplastic elastomer. The material acts similar to a high-end Santoprene—the TPV/TPE designed by Advanced Elastomer Systems L.P. and now owned by ExxonMobil—said Ed Park, Freudenberg-NOK senior staff chemist and FluoroXprene developer. —Rubber News

Name of the week

Do you mind?

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Rejoinder

Baudelairean quasi-Ouroboros:

At once both tail and head, alternating and reciprocal... Cut out any vertebra and the two pieces of this serpentine fantasy will easily rejoin. Chop it into many fragments and you will see how each is able to exist apart. Hoping some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I make bold to dedicate to you the entire snake.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Night writing

Not to be missed: Rachel Aviv's "Listening to Braille" in today's Times magazine—a fascinating and genuinely profound piece on Braille, literacy, and technology.

Here's just one of many good bits—an excerpt of a fictional story written by a 16-year-old "who didn’t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to [his] words played aloud":

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.